


once more to see you

by creampuffs



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 13:13:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20706569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creampuffs/pseuds/creampuffs
Summary: It isn't until the sixth go-around that she realizes that she's not experiencing schizophrenia, or even severe déjà vu. She stares through the grimy bars of her cell and awakens to the sudden clear knowledge that she is re-experiencing her own memories, just not from this lifetime. The voices and faces that follow her and feel so unnervingly real aren't figments of her imagination, or even convincing delusions. They are re-recordings, replays from a past self, bits and pieces that circle the drain without ever quite disappearing from view.a darker reincarnation/soulmate AU for the loveliest of murder wives!





	once more to see you

**Author's Note:**

> worry not, I've not forgotten about my multichap fic! this idea bit me from out of the blue and just wouldn't let go. I may continue this thought somewhere else, but for now, enjoy!

It takes a few times for her to catch on.  
  
She wastes the first five cycles by constantly landing herself into different types of psychiatric wards and mental facilities. They probe and question her, and in each situation, she barks and growls until they slap a muzzle on her and let her rot in some shithole until she actually snaps. In one of them, she gets so bored she collects enough scavenged material from the prison to make a homemade bomb. She feels her first real taste of joy when she succeeds in taking down seven guards with her in the ensuing explosion.  
  
It isn't until the sixth go-around that she realizes that she's not experiencing schizophrenia, or even severe déjà vu. She stares through the grimy bars of her cell and awakens to the sudden clear knowledge that she is re-experiencing her own memories, just not from this lifetime. The voices and faces that follow her and feel so unnervingly real aren't figments of her imagination, or even convincing delusions. They are re-recordings, replays from a past self, bits and pieces that circle the drain without ever quite disappearing from view.  
  
The truth feels like slipping out from a deep fog, or rising from the sticky, thick hold of a swamp. It's a gamble when she sticks the makeshift knife into her own throat, but she's sick of looking at the same four prison walls and fairly confident that when she wakes, she'll have a chance to do things differently.

* * *

  
She's right.  
  
She is a good girl in the next cycle. Or, at least she sets out to be.  
  
She gets as far as her sixteenth birthday before a boy, ruddy and smelling faintly of cured meat, pushes her into the ground and calls her an ugly fucking whore. This is not the first time she's been provoked by this particular asshole, but it is the first time that she is holding a sharpened pencil when he does.  
  
The gush of blood that spurts from his eye is satisfying in a way that feels religious.  
  
It takes three grown men to peel her off of him and even when they manage to separate them, her arms are still swinging madly, forming two perfect windmills that slice through the air. Her laugh bounces off the blood splattered walls and doesn't stop, not even when they come to take her away. She smiles broadly when they dress her in the same hideous gown. In a burst of creativity, she gets as far as tricking the head nurse into bed with her and agreeing to smuggle her out before she decides to be petty and set the whole damn place on fire instead.  
  
The police catch her eventually, and she speeds things up by hijacking the car and driving them straight into the river.  
  
She drowns, delighted by her penchant for violence.

* * *

  
Cycles eight through twelve are explorations of death.  
  
She tries a few different things: assassin, federal executioner, drug dealer and even a doctor. A calculatedly awful doctor, of course. Needless to say, the price of her malpractice insurance is enough to end that cycle fairly soon.  
  
Her mind comes to the conclusion that what makes violence fun isn't necessarily the death that follows, but rather, the human reaction that precedes in facing it—the helplessness, the fear, the terror and the vain hope for life. It is this rich intensity of emotion that she thirsts for, and it is the lives in which she controls it that excite her the most. She comes to the understanding that she is always hungry for action, always starving for some deeper stimuli.  
  
Cycle twelve ends with her stacking up a merry kill count of twenty-two. It also marks the first one in which she gets shot between the eyes, and her only disappointment is that the pain is too fleeting for her to even enjoy.

* * *

  
The awareness of her past lives comes to her at different times in all her cycles. There's little rhyme or reason to any of it, and no warnings for her to prepare for the sudden deluge of memories, thoughts, dreams, and feelings.  
  
In number thirteen, she is fifty-five when it happens, the oldest she's been before waking up to her memories, and she is managing a bed and breakfast with her husband Sebastian in Anchorage, Alaska. The slightly off-centered feeling she had lived with all her life suddenly makes sense, and when she watches Sebastian choke on the arsenic she laced into his meal, she finally feels less like an imposter in her own body.  
  
She's sloppy in this one, as if to make up for lost time, and she knocks off a few people in nearby sleepy towns before getting caught somewhere in Fairbanks. As they sentence her to life in prison, she plans for the next few cycles to be studies in how to disappear, and in how to look good doing it.

* * *

  
As it turns out, disappearing and looking good require money, and while that fact would be discouraging to most, she discovers that she is very good at making money.  
  
No matter what the world looks like when she wakes, there seems to always be a throng of people who are willing to pay big bucks to have someone murdered. Her unflinching love for violence is enough to guarantee her financial success over more than a few cycles, and her cherubic face makes the job almost too easy.  
  
In Ibiza, she dresses herself in riches and soaks in blood money with expensive champagne.

* * *

  
Around cycle eighteen, she learns about the loveliness of women's bodies and is annoyed at herself for not having discovered it sooner.  
  
She wastes a few years mastering the craft, perfecting the right way to look and act to make any woman follow her into the dark. Killing them is not always as fun as fucking them, and she savors the taste of sex that sits on her tongue when she is not making pretty ribbons out of bloodied flesh.  
  
Nadia finds her in a cafe in Barcelona, and turns out to be the type who wrenches her eyes shut when she comes. Therese's next, and has a habit of leaving scratches down her side when she's close. Anna is sweet but confused, and she doesn't know what she wants from the sex, doesn't even know what to call her. Carol calls _too_ much, blows up her phone after one night together, and is swiftly replaced with Naomi, and then Emily, and then Rose.  
  
Each woman is different, and while she devotes herself to this new kind of chase, after a few years, even the thrill of fantastic sex starts to lose its edge. She stands over the disemboweled remains of yet another CEO and gazes at the Californian coastline from a poolside balcony, wondering where to find her next fix.

* * *

  
She fucks and kills her way through the next few lifetimes, laying in wait for something she can't quite name.

* * *

  
Number twenty-nine changes everything.  
  
In this one, she comes to her senses at age six, younger than she's used to. It's hard to grow old enough to act on her impulses, but she's learned from past tries that while a small body is useful for theft, it made it dangerously easy to get funneled into a system of psychiatric care and mental health. Small bodies were also shit at protecting themselves.  
  
By the time she's twenty-five, she manages to stay low and situate herself with a crime ring that pays her enough to afford the lifestyle she's used to. Of all the cities she's lived in, she prefers Paris the most, and while she makes it her home, in this particular life she is asked to take care of business in New York on an almost regular basis.  
  
It is on one of these trips where she meets her for the first time.  
  
She is waiting for the train back to her hotel after having finished a job when a phone suddenly goes off beside her. She turns towards the source, hands still buried in her pockets, and freezes.  
  
An Asian woman stands before her, answering the call while cocking her head to balance the phone between her ear and shoulder as she rummages through her bag. She's mumbling somewhat drunkenly, wide smile on her face, and her hair is a black and beautiful mess. She's middle-aged and dressed in a bright blue evening gown, and even under the sick light of the underground tunnel, she is an absolute vision.  
  
She feels the ground beneath her shift, feels a sudden surge of life thrum through the very marrow of her bones.  
  
The train groans into the station, and she is too struck, too shaken to move or even follow when the woman steps into the train, disappearing into the maw of public transit once the doors slam shut.  
  
Her regret follows her well onto the next life.

* * *

It is a complete mess trying to find her again.  
  
Just as there is no rhyme or reason to when she remembers her past life, there is no rhyme or reason for where the mystery woman is at any given time. The instant she remembers, she always travels straight to New York, straight to the same exact station where she first saw her.  
  
She is never there, and with each and every passing cycle, she feels herself grow more and more desperate, more indescribably feral.  
  
Her kills grow more brutal, and her employers are unnerved but silent. Random women don't taste as good, drugs are not as interesting, and no amount of absurdly expensive alcohol does anything to slake her thirst.  
  
Finally, just as she is about to give up early from boredom and frustration in number forty-one by blowing her brains out in front of a tour group by Big Ben, she sees her again.  
  
"Eve, wait up!"  
  
She stares, completely mesmerized, and almost misses the arrival of a tall, shaggy haired man. She watches as he places a casual hand on her waist and offers up a greasy plate of food.  
  
"I got us some fish and chips. Figured you'd be hungry."  
  
"Ohh, god, Niko. You're amazing."  
  
Eve. Her name is Eve.  
  
The knowledge coils around her, embedding itself tightly into the fabric of her soul. She watches with vague disinterest when he leans down to kiss her, mustache covered in oil. In that fleeting instant she knows that this won't work, at least not like this.  
  
The shot of her gun sends people scattering left and right, and she watches, transfixed, as Eve screams over Niko's bleeding body. She waits for Eve to look up and notice her, and when she does, she smiles like a shark, eyes unblinking.  
  
"Hi."  
  
She cocks the gun under her chin, and thrills when Eve lurches forward, shouting.  
  
"No!"  
  
There's no controlling the giggle that spills out, or the euphoric wheeze of laughter that follows it. She feels everything at once, can almost even see herself flooded by the electric high.  
  
"Sorry, baby, but we'll do this again soon. Next time, without the fudge-face."  
  
In her excitement, her aim ends up being slightly off. She stays alive long enough to see Eve crouched over her, pressing down desperately over the wound while chanting slurred pleas and high pitched cries.  
  
Her shining face, wet with tears, is easily the most beautiful thing she's seen in all her lives combined. She chases it into the dark, reaching for the bloodied smear on Eve's cheek as if it were the last hanging fruit on a long forgotten tree.  
  
Death is neither quick nor sweet, but she finds this time that it tastes all the better for it.


End file.
